Make the Most of Your Holiday PPC Budget
The Season for Insights and Timing
Every year people talk about how early the holiday season has started. But for an advertiser, the kickoff date is unclear. Determining when to start advertising and where to allocate the bulk of the holiday marketing budget can be the key to successful growth. So, while the economy may not be doing so hot this year, the question remains, “how can you maximize profits during the holiday upswing in spending?” Your answers should focus on timing and targeting, goals well suited to search marketing.
Research Tools
To keep your holiday advertising campaign efficient, a carefully structured PPC bidding plan will go a long way. Obviously, a thorough understanding of your products and services is vital. Research should then refine your assumptions to make the big improvements that matter in terms of ROI. To do this, two resources are particularly useful.
- Last year’s data
Pull up Adwords, analytics, weblog, and any tracking data you may have, and look through the data. Of particular interest should be the keywords and products that generated the most traffic and the most profit last holiday season. If you discover that a particular set of keywords are perennially popular, designing a landing page for your campaign centering around the soon-to-be buzz words can dramatically improve conversion rates. And when you go to place bids for the popular keywords, you might just find them a bit cheaper due to an improved quality score. - Google Insights / Seasonal Keyword Reports
A second great tool, especially for companies lacking previous data, is Google Insights. I should first caution that Google Insights only provides normalized data, meaning you will not get any idea of the overall search volumes. Other keyword tools can be used to provide overall search volumes; there is no sense in designing a seasonal keyword list that ignores search volumes. That said, Insights and other tools providing data on seasonality can provide some subtle but powerful clues as to how to spend your advertising dollars.
Online Trends ≠ In-Person Trends
When looking through the research, some of the most valuable finds exist where the data doesn’t match your expectations. Take the fitness industry, for example. A lot of people would probably guess correctly that January is the prime time for new gym memberships. But if you have, say, $10,000 to spend in online advertising, where do you place the bulk of the money? Do you divide across two months? Do you spend most of it in the second, third, or fourth weeks of January?
Fitness industry managers would probably suggest the first two weeks of January. Online, Google Insights reveals a different timetable for online traffic.
Interest Over Time
Check out the normalized numbers, or relative popularity index of searches for “personal trainers.”
The traffic spike starts on Christmas day and then drops off after the first week of January. In-person signups usually keep strong until mid-February, so the search traffic clearly indicates a customer research phase that starts earlier then the actual signup phase.
Budget Allocation and Scheduling
An online advertiser in the fitness industry would be wise to start spending more money around Christmas day and then hit a peak at New Year’s Day. To further target the advertising, you can explore the trends by the hour. You may discover that the conversion rates vary by time of day. For example, potential clients may be filling out a fitness industry contact form at higher percentages during the lunchtime hours. Tying this data together with the weekly trends, a campaign could be designed to spend the largest share of a holiday budget on a 4-hour window during lunch over a 2-week period. Using techniques like these, you can be sure to spend your money on ads that potential clients will find immediately useful and relevant. So while your competitors are spending money evenly across the holiday season, your campaign can spend at the times when people are most likely to act, putting your company ahead of the pack.
